#anwyays i made an account on Indeed and now the job wants me to make an account on their location website GRRRRR

[piplupod]

WHY DO I NEED TO MAKE /TWO/ ACCOUNTS TO SEND IN A RESUME TO THIS PLACE WHAT THE FUCK !!!!!!!

also i just found eraser shavings in my ear HFSHDGDSJKL

[marta-bee]

I’ve been thinking a bit about Mary Watson and AGRA; or Agra, if you prefer.

If you know your Doyle canon you know Mary started out as a client who’d been receiving these mysterious gifts of jewels (or pearls? I’m going from memory) from a stranger, and wanted to know where they came from. It turned out a male relation (estranged father? uncle?) had been involved in some scheme that netted him and his compatriots a treasure of questionable legality and/or morality, that the male relation was now dead and one of his fellows was sending Mary a pittance from the treasure out of a sense of obligation.

I twisted my foot this morning and am still slightly loopy from painkillers. It’s also been a while since I’ve read The Sign of the Four. So bear with me.

Here’s the key point, though: at some point Watson decides that he quite likes Mary and starts to court her (... sort of ...) but he’s not sure it’s really the right thing to do. If the case turns out one way and Mary inherits the full treasure, she’s going to be really rich! Much moreso than Watson; and he’s quite unestablished, doesn’t even have a medical practice or a job outside helping Holmes that I can remember. That in itself is actually quite interested; he’s clearly capable of running about when Holmes needs it. But nevermind. In the end the treasure is lost in a daring boat-chase, and Mary is just a respectable governess with no great fortune to her name. Watson can marry her honorably, and does. The case is solved, John and Mary ride off together, the Yard gets the credit for a case duly solved, and Holmes is left to his seven-percent solution.

That bit always brings a tear to my eye. I’ve only made my peace with it because I look at it story-externally, as Doyle trying to lay Holmes to rest so he can go off and write about fairies or some such. But talk about queer-coding the man!

Anwyay, back to Mary and Agra. There’s some obvious parallels to BBC here and if they’ve been discussed I’ve missed out on the discussion. The fascinating thing is, it’s really not that clear how we’re supposed to read it. The obvious parallel is Agra/AGRA, as in the flashdrive. If AGRA is empty then John and Mary are well-matched. Only they’re not. As devastated as John is by Mary’s betrayal (and her shooting Sherlock? One would think.) .... pre-revelation, John is growing bored. Maried bliss doesn’t suit him; he’s biking to work, half-packed, dreaming about the war and his adventures with Sherlock in a way that seems structured like the sorta-kinda affair we see him playing with in TLD. If AGRA is empty, Mary may be *worthy* of John but she’s hardly a good match. And isn’t that a turnaround from the original? AGRA being empty might make her a fitting match for the man John wants to be post-TRF, but at a fundamental level it’s not just working.

There’s another way of reading this though. In BBC, Agra/AGRA isn’t just some external thing Mary was given, it’s a record of who she actually is. Not just her, but including her. And if Agra/AGRA is Mary’s self, then in a sense whether the jewel-box is empty or full depends on if you think she’s really pregnant or not; and whether you think the baby’s actually John’s. At least through the end of HLV, the fact that there’s a baby in the picture is one of the easiest explanations for why fans can understand John shooting Mary. There’s an awful lot to forgive there, and she’s hardly the most penitent of characters. So in a sense, if AGRA is full John can (indeed, must) honorably be her husband; if it’s empty his continued staying with her seems a lot less intuitive.

That feels like a damning condemnation of my own psychology as a fan, and I’m hardly the only fan who makes sense of HLV along these lines. Because it reduces Mary to a chalice only valued for the jewels within; and it takes away a lot of her responsibility to be held accountable for her own actions. I don’t like myself for finding that more convincing than the idea that a newly married man might try to move past a great betrayal because he loves his wife. Whatever other factors need accounting for (and yes, shooting Sherlock and being an assassin for hire and --at least subtextually-- taking on the role of Moran in EMP and making a lot of sense as being connected to Moriarty (what were they doing with that parallel if they never meant to follow through..... ) -- whatever else needs to be made sense of, I think if you’re going to imagine John and Mary making sense as a continuing couple, those explanations need to start from a place of re-commitment to each other and a need to move past who she was.

(Yes, who you are does matter. Obviously.)

As always, here’s where I bump against the reality of S4′s fuckery. I would love to say that Mofftiss were being clever and trying to do something intentional with all of this, but after the way Mary’s past was just so completely sidestepped, attributing cleverness does seem like a leap of faith. Not sure how seriously I should think about authorial intentions here. At the level of thinking through the parallels as a fan on my own, though, it does seem ... interesting, I guess, at a minimum.